A DC-area Mommy, gamer, coder, archer, and general bon viveur, Aimee is thrilled to be passing her passion for life on to her two sons.

When playing at adulthood, she develops ecommerce sites and documentation for Virid. When playing online, she is a Community Manager for Genia Games and Citadel Studios. In the spare time she wishes she had, Aimee writes for Game Geex on Aggro Range.

Aimee is a Competent English Speaker™ and fluent in Standard Galactic.

MySQL + Password Errors = Even Google Can’t Help

MySQL + Password Errors = Even Google Can’t Help

MySQL + Password Errors = Even Google Can’t Help

August 28, 2014Aimee Jarboe

I hate getting authentication errors in general. At the worst, authentication errors return as a “wrong password!” popup, becoming a catchall for “I don’t know the error, the server just didn’t like me.” At best, you have ruled out typos, permissions, or just plain “being wrong” and begin the onerous task of sifting through millions of tech forum and stackoverflow questions from people who haven’t ruled out user error, hoping to find the one post from a person whose error code and situation matches yours–and contains a solution.

I triple checked my command; it was right. I tried checking the user permissions for the database—also correct. I could log in and out of MySQL without issue and execute any command from inside. I started Googling like mad, returning pages and pages of results for “MySQL 1045 error” that had nothing to do with me. For nearly two hours, I tried changes to my mysqldump command with always the same error. At least it was consistent.

I use DigitalOcean for hosting and adore them not just for reliability and cost, but also for the support community they’ve built. I look to their setup when I have doubts about the direction I’m taking my own tech-oriented communities. I remembered creating this particular droplet with their “one-click WordPress on Ubuntu” install several months ago, and started digging into the DigitalOcean support discussions. I had already ruled out the overall problem being outlined in their documentation, but I was hoping for a hint—and found it in the comment thread for an unrelated issue!

Names changed to protect the innocent.

I’d changed my root password during the server setup, but this seemed important enough to check. I rushed to the file and opened it to find that randomly generated password still listed under a “client” section.

Now, Google could help! To the MySQL documentation I went, learning that this .my.cnf file contained usually helpful configurations to save time. I learned the “client” section provides overrides not for MySQL, but obviously any client programs (likely why it was there during install). This default, randomly generated password was overriding the correct (updated during install) password I had to use with mysqldump requests. Once I removed that client password entry—PERFECT!